SDSU research supports return to soybean meal as cattle feed

Feeding soybean meal to feedlot cattle is not new, and after a long span of soy-based cattle rations being the exception, research from South Dakota State University supports bringing it back. Flourishing corn-based ethanol production a couple of decades ago made distillers dried grains plentiful and inexpensive as cattle feed, according to Warren Rusche, assistant professor and extension beef feedlot management specialist at South Dakota State University.

“Twenty-plus years later, we’ve got a whole generation of nutritionists who have never fed soybean meal to cattle. With the increased amount of soybean crush capacity, we’re going to be in a position where we’re going to have a lot more soybean meal on the market,” Rusche told the South Dakota Soybean Network. “The commodity groups in South Dakota and Minnesota have been generous enough to support some of our research efforts to look at soybean meal comparing directly against distillers [dried grains] because believe it or not, there wasn’t a lot of those direct comparisons done when distillers was coming on the market.”

SDSU’s research has found what Rusche calls interesting aspects of feeding soybean meal instead of distillers grains, which has resulted in researchers looking more closely at soybean meal.

“We’ve found that substituting out distillers grains with soybean meal has supported increased performance, at least during portions of the feeding period. With some yearling steers, we found really pretty dramatic differences in feed conversion and performance in the first 21 days,” he said. “We’re wondering if that isn’t something that can be exploited later. And we’ve also observed that just feeding additional amounts of crude protein from soybean meal as a replacement of distillers supported additional performance.”

What will tip the scales to or from soybean meal will be its price and how soybean meal will affect the cost of gain. Rusche maintains that cattle have a greater potential for growth than what previous research has shown.

“They also have an increased capacity for appetite, so in some ways, we don’t have to change the diet so much; we’re just changing how much those cattle will eat. But a lot of what it comes down to is what is the price difference. [That] certainly is important,” he said. “But we also think there are some opportunities to target some higher quality protein into certain phases of the cattle production cycle and the growing and finishing phase where soybean meal or derivatives of soybean meal look really competitive.”

South Dakota State University’s Warren Rusche is featured on The Soybean Pod available wherever you get your podcasts, brought to you by South Dakota soybean farmers and their checkoff.